Oracle acquires Ravello, will bake it into Big Red Cloud

Ravello de-cloaked in 2013, giving the world technology that virtualises hypervisors to make them portable. The outcome of that trick is the ability to encapsulate an app and run it just about anywhere, without having to re-tool it for a particular cloud. The upshot of this trick is that an app built on ESX will happily run in a Xen-powered cloud like AWS. Or in any other cloud on any other hypervisor.

Ravello's announcement of the acquisition says it's business as usual.

“I want to emphasize that our top priority is ensuring an uninterrupted service and seamless experience for you and all of our customers and partners,” writes CEO Rami Tamir. “Rest assured, Ravello’s service will continue 'as is'.”

Tamir adds that “Ravello will join in Oracle’s IaaS mission to allow customers to run any type of workload in the cloud, accelerating Oracle’s ability to help customers quickly and simply move complex applications to the cloud without costly and time-consuming application rewrites.”

Which sounds like good news for Oracle, whose cloud is well-regarded but not often mentioned in the top tier of cloud providers. A less-demanding on-ramp into Big Red's Big Red Cloud may make it more attractive.

The value of the transaction's not been disclosed, but sources report US$500 million will change hands. ®